By KRISTEN MILLARES BOLT, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, November 3, 2005

Amazon.com customers will soon be able to buy their books one page at a time.

When the largest Internet retailer starts its new Amazon Pages service next year, online shoppers will be able to buy their reading material in portions of their choosing.

And for those who buy books in the traditional way -- whole, bound and on paper -- Amazon will also debut Amazon Upgrade next year, giving buyers the additional immediate and perpetual online access to the complete texts of their purchases for an additional fee.

That means that "Harry Potter" fans needn't anxiously await the delivery of the next installment -- they can just buy the Upgrade and read even before the book lands on their doorstep. And if an owner's bound book is lost, the buyer can simply go online to read it.

The cost of Amazon Pages may be as little as a few cents per page, depending on whether the book is a novel or a reference book, according Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos.

"Ultimately, the copyright holder is going to make those decisions setting the pricing at the right levels," said Bezos during an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, although he said technical and reference books would likely cost more. Whether shoppers can print their Amazon Page purchases, or just view them online, will also depend on the publisher.

Bezos said Amazon Upgrade will be available for a small percentage of the price paid for the physical book, giving the example of $1.99 for an upgrade on a $20 book.

"Anything that you will have long reading sessions with, we think people will still want the physical book, and that is where Amazon Upgrade comes in," said Bezos. "For the most part, people will probably not buy just a few pages of a novel, but for reference books, Amazon Pages makes sense."

Amazon's announcement came on the same day Google debuted a large installment of its much-contested online library, opening up the texts of thousands of public-domain books for free online viewing.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is facing lawsuits from authors and publishers over its project to scan copyrighted texts from five major libraries without permission.

Google Print, which initially aimed to make copyrighted material available for free public use, currently only features materials that aren't entangled in a copyright battle. Google is touting its Print program as a way for publishers to promote their materials free of charge.

By contrast, Amazon continues to seek permission of the publishers because, Bezos said, "these are copyrighted works, and they are not going to be offered for free."

Amazon's new programs are the next step in its 2-year-old "Search Inside the Book" program, available on half of all the books its sells nationally.

Books whose contents are searchable, said Bezos, are selling in the U.S. and abroad at a rate of 8 percent higher than non-searchable texts.

Bezos said that he was not sure if Amazon Pages would boost the company's overall dollar sales by driving more but smaller purchases, or cut into them by allowing shoppers to spend less money buying only a section, rather than a whole book.

Bezos seemed acutely aware of the competition, saying that "customers are only loyal up to the second that someone else offers them a better service."

When asked whether the timing of the Amazon announcement was chosen to dampen the hype around the Google Print debut, he said that his company "announced this now because we had already discussed this and brought so many publishers in the loop that it wasn't practical to keep it under wraps. Too many people already knew about it."

Amazon and Google are not alone. Microsoft Corp. announced plans last week for a book-search service of its own. The company said Thursday that it has worked out an arrangement with the British Library, the United Kingdom's national library, to digitize about 100,000 out-of-copyright books from the library's collection for indexing and searching as part of the MSN Book search service.

"A handful of Internet companies are converging on each other, competing more and more directly," said analyst Dan Geiman of the Seattle-based McAdams Wright Ragen. "Amazon's big theme is to use technology to drive additional loyalty and pick up new customers."

Pat Soden, the director of the University of Washington Press, said he is "very optimistic about Amazon's new service," although he said that one of the biggest hurdles still faced by the programs is the copyrights of illustrations.